3 Benefits of Sprinting for Strength, Speed, and Fitness

Once you’ve completed the period of your youth when you were engaged in organized sports, that often spells the end of your time participating in any setting where you’re required to go all out. Nowadays, your cardiovascular training may consist of up to 20 minutes of walking or slowly jogging on a treadmill either before or after weight training, and an occasional walk through the neighborhood.

While these are certainly healthy activities, your refusal to figuratively press the pedal to the floor when you exercise means that you might be depriving your body of one of its most valuable capabilities, not to mention denying it the associated benefits. With this in mind, here are three reasons why everyone should add sprint training to their cardio day.

You Create a More Powerful Lower Body

There is an important distinction between strength and power that often goes unstated. While strength refers to the maximum ability of your muscles to exert force, power refers to your ability to produce force quickly. 

By engaging in sprinting — regardless of the sort of sprinting activity you’re participating in — you’re rewiring your muscles to produce explosive force, and prompting the development of greater power.

In the case of sprinting during ground-based activities like running, you’ll be training your body to rapidly generate propulsive force against the ground, which also translates favorably to other athletic tasks, like jumping.

You’ll Develop True Physical Preparedness

There’s considerable evidence that the addition of sprinting to the training programs of endurance athletes imbued them with a capacity for rapid movement that they didn’t possess until they began going all out with greater frequency.

In the origin tale of the landmark Tabata training regimen, Olympic speedskaters who completed four-minute, sprint-rest cycles of training four times per week followed by one day of steady-state training had similar aerobic capacities to athletes who only engaged in steady-state training of 60 minutes per day, five days a week.

On top of this, the sprint-trained athletes also developed far greater anaerobic potential than their peers who only participated in steady-state training. The result is that sprinting transformed them into more well-rounded athletes, while also enabling them to achieve this state of fitness while spending far less total time acquiring their abilities.

You’ll Develop True Physical Readiness

As often as you tell yourself that running at a slow pace is helping to maintain your body in case you need to respond to an emergency, the reality is that when time is of the essence, you’re probably going to be moving at break-neck speed. 

If you’re going to prime your body to respond affirmatively during the moments that matter most, you need to familiarize yourself with all of the variables involved in all-out movement, which also includes coordination… another trait that takes time to develop.

Chances are that if you haven’t coaxed a single sprint out of your body since your final high school football game, the current version of your body isn’t even capable of moving optimally in an emergency setting. For this reason alone, it’s worth introducing sprinting into your regular training simply for the sake of restoring your ability to do it.

Reclaim Your Speed

In all likelihood, sprinting was one of your basic abilities once upon a time, and you’ve allowed it to drift out of your athletic repertoire simply because you were never forced to continue the practice. If you fall into this category, please consider adding sprinting to your regular fitness routine in some form. That way, you’ll recover a valuable ability and be able to craft a body that is truly ready for anything.

Summary:

1. Most cardiovascular fitness programs neglect to include sprinting.

2. Sprinting regularly can increase the ability of your legs to generate power, which can then be used in other movements and exercises.

3. Regular sprinting has been proven to help aerobic athletes retain their aerobic potential with less total training time, while also boosting their anaerobic capacity.

4. The absence of sprinting in training results in bodies that are ill-prepared and uncoordinated when they are eventually required to move fast.

5. Because emergency situations require you to move at your fastest, sprint training is one of the most logical ways to train for true emergencies.